Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
2 Samuel 11:1-5
In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him; they ravaged the Ammonites, and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem. 2It happened, late one afternoon, when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king's house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful. 3David sent someone to inquire about the woman. It was reported, "This is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite." 4So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she was purifying herself after her period.) Then she returned to her house. 5The woman conceived; and she sent and told David, "I am pregnant."
This time of year our evenings are often filled with the nearly deafening sound of the mating calls of the male cicadas. It won't last long though. If you will look around when you take a walk anywhere in the Ozarks you will see the remains of these loud summertime lovers.
The cicada is born as a worm, usually from an egg sac carefully placed in a cut in the bark of a tree by a female cicada, but when they are born they drop to the ground and dig down a foot or so and there they live in the damp darkness of the earth, feeding off of the fluids of tree roots.
And there they will live, sometimes for decades.... Year after year, never seeing sunlight nor gazing on a blue sky. But after 13 or 17 years, when the temperature of the soil is just right, these worms will crawl up out of the ground and climb up on the tree where they have fed for years and there they are transformed..... one of the most amazing transformations in nature.
What we are hearing these days is the Kansan brood IV cicada that was born in 1998.
In a matter of days after crawling out of the ground, they will grow legs, eyes, and even amazing wings.... And these former worms will take to the air and burst into lusty song in the warm summer days and mate with partners in their gathering trees....for a week or two, and then they die.
I see the exhausted remains of these large bugs on the sidewalk near my home and I want to ask, "Well, Romeo, was it worth it?"
If you ever wonder why you see box turtles out in the road during the spring and summer and no other times, it is much the same. They are risking their lives, slowly walking out in traffic, in search of love....well, at least in search of sex.
There are no evangelical worms among the roots of trees warning the congregation against the perils of growing wings and flying, which can lead only to very noisy sex and nearly immediate death. There are no box turtle mothers lecturing their sons, "You are the slowest moving four-footed animal on earth, you must never venture out onto the pavement, ever!"
There is no moral deliberation to sex in most of nature. The reproductive lives of insects, fish, mammals, and reptiles evolved in ways that best served the survival of their species.... Though you have to admit that the whole thing about growing a new body with legs and wings is outrageously elaborate, it still embodies no will, decision-making, or morality. It just is.
Morality is a human invention and a relatively recent one at that....so recent, in fact, that it does not yet appear to have infected the entire population.
Sexual behavior is instinctive in all living things. In some, to serve the evolutionary survival of the species, things that we would call family, or herd, or tribe, or flock, emerged, even monogamy.
And, even in nature, though it is instinctive, it is not always about propagation. Marine scientists insist that dolphins have sex for fun. And as anyone who has spent much time on the farm knows, homosexuality is not found only in humans. Clearly, sexual contact is a part of bonding and relationship building that is not always about propagation.
The difference between animals and humans is that we have become self-aware and developed the ability to communicate through speech which has led to the building of civilizations and things like houses, cars, farms, and boats which eventually meant that what once came naturally to us became closely defined by society and laws, replete with lawyers, tabloids, and the whole industry of pornography, and its cousins in the fields of fashion and cosmetics.
I have done a lot of relief work in rural Nicaragua and for many years I served on the board of the Rainbow Network with other very good and well-intended people who wanted to help the poor in those impoverished jungle villages. We had one couple from Ohio on our board who were very adamant that, as a part of our educational mission, that we had to include abstinence education.
Now, Nicaragua, situated very close to the equator, has 12 hour days and 12 hour nights all year long.
In the villages where we worked, there are no electric lights. There is no TV, radio, or movies. They don't have musical instruments and most families can't even afford candles. And this very Puritanical couple wanted us to teach our adolescent friends in these villages not to have sex.
What I tried to say to them, quite unsuccessfully, I might add, is that human civilization with all of its rules, morality, and ethical ideas, is less than ten thousand years old. Human evolution with all of its reproductive and sexual impulses is more than two million years old. In the dark nights of the Nicaraguan jungle, in any clash between civilization and its rules and evolution with its instinctive drives, my money is on evolution.
But that is not to say that everywhere you look in Matagalpa you see pregnant teenagers or that there are mothers who do not know who the fathers of their babies are. It is not that civilization and its scruples do not have some management influence on instinct, I'm just saying, in matters of sexual relationships, evolution has the upper hand.
What many of my religious peers seem to resist acknowledging is that there is no distinct and forever religious ideal for sexual mores. The 20th century western ideal of a man and a woman being faithfully married to one another for life has not only been fairly rare in its realization, it is a late comer on the stage of human civilization.
For most of Biblical history, having lots of wives was viewed as a sign of God's blessing on a man. Men, in antiquity, were encouraged to grow the size of their tribe and so even sexual slavery was not only accepted in their culture, it was encouraged.
It was not until their lands were faced with over crowding and limited resources that the rules began to change to favor the needs of the civilization.
Modern critics of Islam have accused the Prophet with having been a pedophile because one of his wives, Aisha, was only six years old when Muhammad married her and nine years old when he consummated the marriage. And while anyone who did such a thing in the modern era would absolutely be considered to be a pedophile, and though there were those even in Muhammad's time who objected to this practice, it was not uncommon. Muslims remember Muhammad as the most perfect human who ever lived, however, if he had sex with a nine year old in our era, we would have locked him away in prison and never let him out.
Our wisdom lesson today comes from the well known account of King David's affair with Bathsheba. David was another prominent religious figure who was popularly considered to be a "man after God's own heart." He had multiple wives, none of whom had any personal choice in the matter and many of whom were a part of the spoils of military conquest and yet even in that barbaric context, even the King was not allowed to have another man's wife.
There was tremendous shame and guilt associated with this affair, so much so that there was even a murder orchestrated to cover up for it. Politics and sexual scandals seem to always be with us.
Very often, these scandals reveal not only the hypocrisy of an individual public figure but also the hypocrisy of social norms and expectations.
Following the advent of the creation of effective birth control and the legalization of abortion, we began to hear people trying to carve out a modern ethic for sex that said that anything that happens between two consenting adults is no one else's business.
That is a simple and straightforward proposition that removes cultural prejudices against same-sex relationships, inter-racial and inter-religious relationships, but it simultaneously opens the door to debate what amounts to consent.
We all agree that children cannot meaningfully give consent and so we define adult life as beginning at age 18 and for years college professors were among the most predatory people in the world, regularly using their status to seduce the young adults who populated their classes. It wasn't until the 1980's that universities begin to lay down the law about ethical conduct even among what otherwise might have been seen as a consenting relationship.
But we would not be inclined to charge two 16 year olds with any crime for engaging in adolescent sex but we might if one was 16 and the other was 20. And, of course, we have the remarkable unfolding account of Bill Cosby's use of drugs in a career long casting couch practice that was ignored by his peers for 30 years and now that it is revealed, the formerly beloved comedian seems to be genuinely confused by society's condemnation.
But Cosby is not alone in this. One of my favorite authors, the famous psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, was notorious for having sex with some of his clients. His book, The Road Less Traveled, one of the all time best selling books in the 20th century, even casually mentions the fact that he sometimes had sex with clients and that phrase was hardly noticed for twenty years. By the end of the 20th century, this would have given him a jail cell right next to Muhammad but at the time it didn't even provoke his wife, Lilly, to divorce him.
But there are still more fine points to what is considered to be legitimate consent. In the past couple of years, the book Fifty Shades of Gray, seems to have raised the question, is it rape if the perpetrator is really really rich? And, indeed, there seems to be no problem in finding any number of women who are willing to be paraded in a sexual exploitation obsenity called, "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?"
There are countries that have legalized prostitution and in doing so they appear to have reduced the instances of rape and sexually transmitted diseases and yet, thinking people are still forced to wonder how often a woman actually enters this trade willingly. Most are either victims of molestation or they have been trafficked, tricked, or coerced into the sex trade.
And no matter how much we would want to defend free speech and oppose censorship, you cannot escape the awareness that most women who work in the pornography trade did not end up there because that was their best and easiest way to make a living.
For cicadas and box turtles, there is not much conversation around morality. For humans, there is no end to discussion, redefining, and trying to work our way towards equality and justice in this matter of both the greatest personal privacy and the greatest potential for abuse, psychological damage, and exploitation.
I hope that the Catholic Church has learned that its practice of celibacy is not only unnatural but it is inevitably going to lead to perversion and abuse. I hope that both right wing politicians and evangelical religious leaders can look to their own ranks to see how absurd their abstinence only priorities are a piece of the same cloth as the Catholic Church's institutional insanity regarding healthy relationships.
Universities that were remarkably late to the table in realizing that there can be no meaningful consent between a professor and a student are finally also realizing that even among the student population, that there can be no meaningful consent between students if one of them is intoxicated or high, whether they ingested those intoxicating substances knowingly or unknowingly. Neither silence nor acquiescence is tantamount to consent.
So, what can a church that is married both to concepts of individual freedom and social responsibility say about sex in the 21st century?
There is no Bible passage nor is there a technical medical definition that will entirely suffice. In the end, I can only tell you what I believe and you are not only free to disagree you are encouraged to work this out for yourselves and I invite your reasoned responses:
1) Sex between consenting adults should be considered to be a private and entirely personal matter free from the judgment of either the church or your neighbors. Still, consent is a matter of vital importance and should not be polluted with power or coercion of any sort. Don't listen to gossip, don't start or repeat gossip, and don't try to invade anyone else's private lives to do them harm or to satisfy your own curiosity.
2) Sex should be approached with mutual respect and with an informed awareness that it is virtually never just recreational. It always means something and has the potential to do one or both persons involved great personal harm, so it should never be entered into only to meet your own personal desires but should always be a mutually beneficial relationship.
3) Divorce is neither evil nor is it to be applauded. Many people are an excellent match for one another at one stage of life and the relationship can become toxic due to no fault of either party and society is not well served by trying to force people to stay in unhealthy unions. However, there is a great deal to praise in marriages that last for a lifetime, solving their problems, growing together, and fostering the kind of communication that rises above the issues that prove to be fatal in other unions. We should not judge those who choose to part company but we should celebrate those who show the rest of us how two thoughtful people can succeed where so many of us have failed. Never envy your single friends. Trust me, it was not our first choice.
4) And finally, I would like to encourage you to see your sexuality, not as a source of shame or guilt but as a gift... something that should be fun and playful, full of good humor and happy memories. It does not only give the gift of children to your family but it can be a part of the cement of trust, vulnerability, affection, and intimacy that binds two people to one another.
And finally, for those of you who choose to believe that sexual intimacy should be pursued without conscience or concern for consequences, I can only suggest this... try to grow a pair of wings and fly but don't expect it to end well.
